Around 2,400 years ago, a house with several rooms stood against the defensive wall of a settlement in what is now northern Tunisia. Archaeologists have now recovered almost its entire floor plan, something the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICAC) says has been documented for the first time. The finding comes from the second excavation […]

When the cloud of burning ash and gas rolled into the room, the wardrobe was still standing. The wood took almost twenty centuries to rot away, but by then the ash had hardened around it and kept its shape. It is the same principle behind the plaster body casts Pompeii is famous for. When archaeologists […]

To measure a horse painted 37,000 years ago, you would normally walk up to the wall. At Chauvet that is impossible. The cave floor still holds footprints tens of thousands of years old, and nobody is allowed to step on it. So the researchers worked from a metal walkway about 2.5 meters (8 feet) from […]

In 2019, workers preparing the ground for a gas pipeline and a new parking lot in the village of Loculi, in the interior of Sardinia, began to find ancient structures. Seven years later, those structures belong to an archaeological site of about 700 square metres (7,500 square feet). The remains it holds range from the […]

Bronze is mostly copper with a smaller share of tin, and the copper that prehistoric miners could reach was scattered unevenly across Europe. When researchers ask where the continent’s Bronze Age copper came from, they have usually looked to the Austrian Alps and Wales. Southern Spain, which sits on one of the largest concentrations of […]

Under the soil and corrosion that coat some of China’s most spectacular bronze masks, scraps of cloth have survived for roughly 3,000 years. A team of archaeologists and heritage conservation specialists has now analyzed those residues on objects from the ritual pits of Sanxingdui and found that every sample examined is silk. The study, published […]

An animal stepped on a mudbrick while it was still soft and left its paw prints in the clay. The brick went into the wall of a house. The house burned and collapsed. About 4,000 years later, archaeologists pulled the brick out of the rubble, prints still visible. Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet […]

Many Egyptian tombs reveal the trade of the person inside. A scribe is buried with his writing palette, a soldier with his weapons. The tomb that has just come to light at Saqqara breaks that pattern. In the burial shaft of a man named Weni, archaeologists found several bronze instruments that may have been used […]

There are more than 8,000 species of amphibians on Earth, and not one of them lives in the sea. Fewer than 2% tolerate any salt at all, and even those have limits. It is a striking gap. Whales, sea turtles and penguins each show that mammals, reptiles and birds can live at sea, with no […]

When the James Webb Space Telescope began photographing galaxies from the universe’s earliest chapters, astronomers ran into a problem. There were more very bright galaxies than their models predicted, and some looked far too massive for such a young cosmos. Part of that puzzle has since faded. Some of those objects turned out to be […]

Between 34,000 and 25,000 years ago, much of Europe shared a way of life that archaeologists call the Gravettian. It is recognized by its stone and bone tools, by the way people buried their dead, and by small carved figurines of women known as Venus figurines. They turn up from the Atlantic side of the […]

On Tuesday, October 20, a team in southeastern Spain lifted a block of stone out of a wall where it had been sitting for about twenty centuries. The block carries fragments of two lines of text. The letters of the main line are 23 centimeters (9 inches) tall, a little more than the width of […]

When an electron meets a positron, both vanish. Their mass turns into energy and nothing is left of either particle. That is the main reason positrons are so hard to study. There is no jar to keep them in, because the walls of any container are made of ordinary matter, and a single touch would […]

About 2,000 years ago, while Augustus ruled Rome, a leftover patch of ice in the Canadian Arctic stopped shrinking and began to grow. A team from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, argues that this turning point marked the beginning of the next glaciation, what most people would call the next ice age. […]

In 160 years of digging at Troy, nobody had found anything you could play. Archaeologists have pulled walls, gates, jewelry, weapons and tableware out of the ground in huge quantities, but never an instrument. This season that changed. The team led by Rüstem Aslan of Onsekiz Mart University in Çanakkale, in northwestern Turkey, recovered a […]

Roman Spain had a network of official roadside stops for officials, soldiers and couriers, yet archaeologists know very few of them for certain. A new study may have added one. The building lies on the edge of Mellaria, a Roman town in the south of the country, on the road between the provincial capitals of […]

On a gravel plain in northern Western Sahara, with no shade for miles, there is a heap of stones 54.5 meters (179 feet) long. Two rows of stone slabs run out from it like the arms of a V that never quite closes. Archaeologists call these rows “antennae”, and the monuments antennae tumuli (a tumulus […]

In the early 5th century, a woman of high rank was buried beside an old Roman posting station on the Via Augusta, in what is now the province of Castellón. Her grave held a glass cup and two gold pins in a style from the Danube region. Her brother died in Mérida, the Roman city […]

Almost nothing survives of what people wore in the Iron Age. Linen, wool and dyes are all organic matter, and in most soils they simply rot away. Archaeologists therefore tend to reconstruct the history of textiles from the tools that do last, above all spindle whorls: small stone or ceramic discs that weigh down the […]

Some 1,900 years ago, a man named Thrasymedes gave a thin sheet of gold to a god who was neither Greek nor Roman. The deity came from the borderlands of what is now southeastern Turkey. The offering was left inside a Roman army fort on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in modern Georgia, […]